Everglades Fishing – Captain Ned Small

This is not just a midden, it’s a vast Calusa Mound complex I found while searching for tarpon, this photo we made to try and show proportion, but it’s deceiving, this is just one mound amoung fifty on this site, there are ridges too and it doesn’t appear to have been excavated. There’s virtually no sign of the white man. I’m over six feet tall and this mound easily reached twenty feet over sea level. I’ll estimate the size of this site tonight, at between forty and sixty acres. You can’t tell because a lot is overgrown, it might be bigger, then again there’s at least fifteen acres where nothing but thorns and thistles grow on the bald shell mounds. Chief Carlos has passed a curse on this mound, that nothing will grow, our fully charged camera batteries were dying with each touch of the shutter, as Karen said, ‘the Ju-Ju is taking the juice.’ We were lucky to escape with this one. Photo by Karen Flanagan.

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2009/feb/08/everglades-city-brawl-leaves-least-one-injured/

Here’s Jay Althoff with the fish of the day. The fishing is tough but you never know what the Everglades might provide in the way of opportunity. We wrassled a few snook in the morning and then we sighted this one in Last Chance Bay on the way home. Here’s the result of the reapplication of rule seventeen.  Jewfish on fly, Everglades style.

A vicious cold front is bearing down on us, the fishing will stink but that doesn’t prevent the few and the brave from sitting at the bar at the Rock Bottom with mittens and scarfs, and old giant jackets we’ve retained from our sojourns up north. My main man Floyd was there and we had some interesting palaver about the winter fishing.

There’s a lake, deep in the Everglades that is usually a winter hold out for giant snook, they’re not giant for no reason and impossible to catch but when the weather gets cold like this they emmigrate, schools of them, big ones. Floyd says they are seeking salt water, that fresh water cools faster and has less oxygen, and the snook move out of their safe house under stress and try to find saline water that is warmer. It certainly looks that way and after observing this puzzeling behaviour I can think of no better explanation.

Not to mention the Tales of The Bay of Pigs, the Smuggling in years gone by, the guiding out of the Rod and Gun a half century ago, did you know there were fifty guides working out of there in the heyday of Barron Colliers regime in the Everglades?

What a great event! Thank you all for all the fun. The fishing was tough, as usual, unless you went to ‘That Place,’ and I think all of us did, at least once.  Captain Waynes fabulous dinner of barbecued chicken, beef tenderloin kebobs, fresh corn on the cob right off the fields of Immokalee, ‘Insane Waynes Bacon and Beans,’ roasted peppers with scallions, potato salad and mushrooms in garlic sauce, the beer, the wine, the scotch and the crown royal, well …that’s about the finest closure of a hard day of winter fly fishing in the Everglades one could ever hope for.

It was around the campfire of Florida lighter pine after dinner though, that swims in my memory, the tales and speculations and some might say downright lies that flew around that fire, that was just inspiring. The sheer density of knowledge of Everglades fly fishing brought to the hearth by both guides and friends was phenomenal, thank you all, I feel priveledged to have been a part of it.

Bill and I are already talking about next year.

Thanks to, Bill, Pete, Rick, Brian, Gary, Stu, Donna, Bob, Farrow, Gus, Dan, Don, Ted, Wayne, Michelle, Leala, and whoever that was that yelled that my front door was open as the raccoons were running up the stairs!